Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an on-board maintenance system of an aircraft, said aircraft comprising pieces of equipment connected together through a first on-board data transmission network for exchanging operational data intended for piloting the aircraft, said maintenance system including a processing unit.
The aircraft is for example a civilian or military airplane. An aircraft includes a large number of distinct, generally interconnected, mechanical, electrical and electronic functional pieces of equipment. These pieces of equipment may generate a multitude of distinct failures which result in a plurality of symptoms observable in the aircraft.
Description of the Related Art
An aircraft generally has a maintenance module which allows identification of the causes of the failures and/or the preventive maintenance operations to be carried out on these pieces of equipment.
In certain aircraft, for example in aircraft of the FALCON type, the pieces of equipment, including the maintenance module are interconnected through an operational digital network, for example complying with the ARINC 429 standard or ARINC 664 standard, recognized by flight certification authorities.
This digital network gives the possibility of conveying between the pieces of equipment the whole of the operational data during a flight of the aircraft. By operational data is meant the whole of the onboard data required for smoothly completing the flight, for piloting. Notably, upon identification of a failure of the system, these data may for example comprise a failure code for a piece of equipment, notably giving the possibility of informing the cockpit on this failure and optionally additional data allowing more specific characterization of this failure in order to allow smooth completion of the procedure to be applied in order to allow continuation of the flight.
This digital network additionally allows transmission to the maintenance module of raw data from the equipment. The maintenance module is dimensioned for storing these data and for analyzing them, with view to analyzing the original source of failures, to contributing to the repair of the aircraft.
However, the band width available on the digital network of the ARINC 429 type, connecting the pieces of equipment is limited by the throughput intrinsic to the standard, and is not sufficient for transmitting all the raw data elaborated by the equipment which may be useful for the maintenance module. Now, by having a large amount of raw data, it is possible to increase the efficiency of maintenance.